Postcolonial sabotage and ethnographic recovery in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

Abstract

This chapter is the first of two on recent novels which rewrite and write back to key texts of anthropology. It first examines the way Kincaid’s 1996 novel conceptualizes postcolonial kinship and its understanding of the destruction, perversion and exploitation of intimate bonds by colonial rule. It then turns to the novel’s engagement with the tradition of ethnographic travel writing on the Caribbean, particularly that of Froude and Lévi-Strauss, to argue that the novel demonstrates the strategic use of a discourse of failure. By embracing, rather than rejecting, colonial accusations of civilizational lack in the Caribbean, the novel is able to effectively reflect back and thereby sabotage such imperialist ideologies. Nonetheless, the limits of this strategy of become clear in the novel’s imagination of the figure of Xuela’s Carib mother. Here, the novel’s embrace of a discourse of failure echoes, rather than undermines, colonial and anthropological accounts of Caribbean indigenous groups and their supposedly inevitable demise, and thus it also partly reproduces the ethnographic gaze.